Havana Bay (29 page)

 
Chapter Sixteen

A pair of Chihuahuas led Arkady down the path, rolling
soulful eyes at him, prancing around a poinsettia here,
sniffing a headstone there, like a pair of tiny landlords until they led him under the hanging pods of a tamarind
tree where three Chinese, stripped to the waist, were
scrubbing a marble lid they had lifted off a sarcophagus.
Erasmo perched inside the tomb with a sack of tools.

"There aren't a lot of jobs where having no legs is an
advantage," Erasmo said.» Working in a coffin happens
to be one. You don't look happy."

Arkady said, "I've just come from the Havana Yacht Club. You told me the Havana Yacht Club was a joke,
just a few fishermen, you, Mongo and Pribluda. But the
picture was taken at the Yacht Club and you never mentioned that the club actually existed."

Erasmo frowned, dug his hand into his beard and scratched.» It does and it doesn't. The building is there,
the beach is there, but it's hardly a club anymore. It's
complicated."

"Like Cuba?"

"Like you. Why didn't you tell me you killed Rufo
Pinero? I had to hear it on the street."

"It was an accident."

"An accident?"

"Of a sort."

"Yes, that's like saying Russian roulette is a game of
a sort. So we do the same things in different ways.
Anyway, I didn't lie to you. We did call ourselves the Havana Yacht Club as a joke. It was funny at the time."

"Some club. Pribluda may be dead, Mongo may be
missing and you may be the last living member."

"I admit, it's not funny when you say it."

"Unless there are others. Are there any other mem
bers you haven't told me about?"

"No."

"Rufo?"

"No."

"Luna?"

"No. The three of us, that's all. You know, you're
pissing me off and you're making my friends very
uneasy."

The Chinese followed the conversation with an anxi
ety matched by their lack of comprehension. Erasmo
coolly introduced Arkady to them, brothers named Liu
with spiky black hair and cigarettes gripped between
their teeth. Arkady took in the cemetery's quiet anarchy,
a marble cross leaning on a Buddhist altar, tablets
inscribed with Chinese characters and wrapped in
morning glory, headstone photographs of the departed
that peered through scummy ovals of glass. A nice place
to die, Arkady thought, quiet, cool, picturesque.

"So this is the Chinese Cemetery?"

"Yes, it is," Erasmo said.» I told the Lius you were an
expert on fighting crime. That's why you're so angry. It
makes them feel much better."

"There's a lot of crime in a cemetery?"

"In this one, yes."

Now that Arkady noticed, many of the tombs were
cracked and reinforced with cement seams and steel
bands. Some of the disrepair had occurred over time
and under the pressure of spreading roots, but there
were also signs of vandalism, marble replaced by cinder
blocks or a padlock on a vault's brass door, probably
not to keep the dead in, Arkady realized.

"Cubans don't like the Chinese?"

"Cubans love the Chinese, that's the problem. And
some Cubans need lucky bones."

"For what?"

"Ceremonies. If they want money they dig up the bones of a banker, if they want to get well they dig up the bones of a doctor."

"That makes sense."

"Unfortunately for the Chinese, their bones are sup
posed to be the luckiest. So this is where certain people come with their crowbars and shovels, which is very
upsetting to Chinese families that revere their ancestors.
Dead or alive, they want granddad in one piece. Little did I know that demolition expertise would prove so
useful in civilian life. How did you know where to find
me?"

"Tico maintained radio silence but I got him to write
it out." Arkady looked down at the coffin, where
Erasmo had laid a drill, bell, welder's goggles and
surgical mask on a towel. From an athletic bag Erasmo
took a vial of something fine-grained and black.»
Gunpowder?"

"Just a touch. Life would be boring without it."
Taking a break, the brothers Liu sliced up a papaya and sat down between tombstones to eat. The Chihuahuas curled up with the lions. Was this the "Chinese
contact" that Pribluda had been talking about, a place
to come for lucky bones?

The problem was that he seemed to be going in
reverse, knowing less all the time rather than more. He
didn't know how or where Pribluda died, let alone
why. The circle of Pribluda's acquaintances constantly
expanded, but none of them had anything to do with the price of sugar, supposedly what the colonel had
been investigating. Arkady had never before encoun
tered such a variety of pristinely unrelated people and
events: men in inner tubes, Americans on the run, a madman from Oriente, a ballerina, now Chinese bones
and Chihuahuas. The truth was, Arkady thought, that
apart from grave-robbing there was no suggestion of
any crime at all, except for the attacks on him, and that
was an error in timing; all they'd had to do was wait.
Now? His head was clearing, the bruises on his legs had
passed from blue to hopeful green, and the very shape
lessness of evidence was interesting. He needed it to be
interesting because while he was engaged he was like a
man walking on deep black water. He needed to keep
going.

Erasmo pulled the mask over his nose and goggles
over his eyes before lifting a can with a plastic lid.

"More gunpowder?" Arkady asked.

"A different explosive." Erasmo lifted the lid and
shut it at once, as if taking a peek at plutonium.»
Ground habaneros, the hottest chilies on earth. I
defused all sorts of bombs in Africa. Bombs that looked
like doorknobs, alarm clocks, toilet seats, toy planes,
dolls. You have to be creative." He upended the empty
can between his thighs and drilled through its bottom.
Erasmo poured in gunpowder and tamped it down.

"In your room I saw some pictures of you with ..." Arkady tried out the gesture of the make-believe beard
for the Name That Could Not Be Uttered just to feel
Cuban.

"Fidel," Erasmo said warily.

"And another officer in glasses."

"Our commander in Angola."

"You won a lot of military decorations."

"The ribbons? Oh, yes. Well, what would I rather
have, the ribbons or my legs? I'll let you guess. I used
to be so proud. Fidel said we would go to Africa and I
saluted and said, 'At your orders, Comandante!' I didn't
know he would be giving orders after we got there.
Fidel was here in Havana looking at a map of Angola. We were in hills and rivers that didn't exist on Fidel's
map, but it didn't matter, he gave orders to set up our
forces wherever his finger landed. Sometimes we had to
ignore him. When he found out he was furious. There
was one little village, a speck that must have been on
 
his map. He said we had to take it and use it as a
battalion command post. We said it was just a couple
of huts, a garage and a well. We could go around it and
come back whenever we wanted, but Fidel said that
unless the village was taken in twenty-four hours every
battalion officer would be charged with treason. So,
Tico and Luna and a boy named Richard and I went in
to clear the way. Maybe this is a boring story?"

"No."

"Very well. The village was strung like a Christmas
tree. Little plastic mines to pop through your foot.
Bouncing Betties to cut you off at the waist. Claymores
with trip wires to something as insignificant as an
empty can you'd kick out of your way. There was a car
in the garage, not with the key, that would have been
too obvious. A '54 Ford station wagon with real
wooden panels. You can't imagine how valuable a vehi
cle was in country like that. But just stepping into the
garage meant digging up a whole daisy chain of little
mines. Then to look underneath the car first with a
mirror and then on your back. To pop the hood with
a wire from a distance, to inspect the engine and make sure every wire's automotive, open the glove compart
ment, the trunk, power windows, seats, hubcaps. It was in beautiful condition. We cleared everyone else out of
the garage so I could cross the wires. It started right
off. It ran out of gas right away, but the battery was
good and everything seemed fine until Richard kicked
a tire. That was one place I hadn't looked, in the tire."
Erasmo pushed a cardboard disk over the gunpowder.

 
 
"That was the end of Richard. Plus, the bumper flew off spinning like a helicopter rotor and caught Tico.
We radioed for the ambulance. On the way it hit a hole where we had dug out a mine and drove right
into the minefield. Somehow it didn't touch a mine
but that's where the ambulance was stuck while Tico
was bleeding to death until Luna picked him up and ran right through the mines to the ambulance. And
that's how we liberated a pisshole in Angola on special
orders from the Comandante."

"And how Tico became careful about tires."

"He's
very
careful about tires."

Erasmo dropped the can and Arkady retrieved it.

"Can I help?"

"No, thanks," Erasmo said.» Do you know the largest minefield in the world? The American base here at
Guantanamo, thanks to the U.S. Marines and, especially,
our Russian friends, who designed our side of the mine
field and then took the plans home. No more help,
please." He opened the can of chilies and poured them
into the larger can.» Aha! When a grave robber opens
this, there will be a deadly cloud awaiting him. Coughing,
crying, sneezing, temporary blindness is, I think, a very
humane way of dealing with grave robbers. As/, a Cuban
solution to a Cuban problem."

"Luna saving Tico is a different picture of the
sergeant."

"No, it's not. It's just the other side. People here have
two sides, what you see and the opposite."

"It's complicated?"
 
 

"It's real. You don't understand. Cuba was some
thing. We had idealism, and we stood up to the most
powerful, most vindictive country on earth. Fidel was great. But Cuba isn't a big enough country for him, and
the rest of us can't be heroes forever. Stop asking
questions, Arkady. For your own sake, go home."

The Lius looked up expectantly; they may not have
understood the words but they could tell when a con
versation had wound to an end. The Chihuahuas
blinked their marble-sized eyes, then tore after a lizard.
They chased it up a bougainvillea vine to the peak of a
waist-high pagoda and when the youngest Liu laughed and performed a karate kick, Arkady was reminded of
something else.

"Are there any martial arts dojos in Havana?"

Erasmo said, "Chinatown."

You had to block things out, Ofelia thought. She
ignored the technicians collecting their small evidence
first—clots, hairs, night bag, glasses, bottles of Havana
Club—working their way up to plastic bags for bed-sheets and clothes. She paid no attention to the pho
tographers working around the female sprawled in bed
like a
Naked Maja.
All her focus was on Dr. Bias. His
hands in waxy rubber gloves, he bent over the body by
the door to show her why, although the male was
painted in his own blood and the track on the carpet
showed his agonizing, futile progress to the door, the
dying man didn't cry for help.